


Eye of the Beholder

by kuolema (salainen)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Body Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 10:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salainen/pseuds/kuolema
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos becomes a true citizen of Night Vale through random mutation. Cecil helps.</p>
<p>Originally written for/posted on the kink meme, but has been slightly cleaned up since.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eye of the Beholder

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this story contains body horror. It's not particularly graphic, but there is some blood and stuff happens to teeth, so if any of that bothers you this story may not be for you.

When Carlos had made the decision to move to Night Vale, he had been expecting a wide variety of scientific (and not-so-scientific) oddities; the data available on the town had indicated as much. It told stories of powerful earthquakes that no one could feel, a sky that somehow reflected wavelengths of light other than blue, rain that the townspeople had originally interpreted as blood but later discovered to be Hawaiian Punch, and even that someone had discovered the secret of time travel. What he hadn't been expecting, however, were the biological mysteries.

It had caught him off-guard when he arrived. It wasn't every day you moved to a new town and found yourself sharing a laundry room with a fellow with three arms, a woman with batwings, and a snake-person, after all. And it wasn't just the neighbours. The mayor glowed a strange shade of green. John Peters, you know, the farmer, had a tail. The guy who ran the pizza place next to Carlos' lab had four eyes. And of course, there was Cecil. Carlos had actually been expecting that the famed Voice of Night Vale would be the strangest one of the lot, but he was in fact entirely human-looking aside from his blanked-out eyes and the fact that he turned an alarming shade of magenta whenever Carlos was around. His relative normality was actually more surprising than anything else could have been. Slightly concerned, he had run some tests to check for excessive radiation or heavy metals in the area, but when the results came back showing nothing out of the ordinary on that front, he had immediately moved "the secret of Night Valean genetics" down his list of Scientific Mysteries. No one was in immediate danger from Dave's extra arm or Mayor Winchell's verdigris, after all, while the same could not be said of those portals that sometimes opened up in the fabric of spacetime.

So Carlos had settled in as comfortably as it was possible to do in a town where the laws of physics were all made up and the scientific principles didn't matter. He learned that Big Rico preferred if two-eyed people made eye contact with his lower eyes, that it was a good sign when Alex in 2B hissed at you, that imaginary corn was actually pretty good, and that Cecil Baldwin was probably the best boyfriend a guy could ask for, the incident with the goat heads aside.

By the time he had been in Night Vale for two years, he had managed to codify several of its particular scientific principles, learned all the words to the town song, chant, and groan in both English and Weird Spanish, and largely forgotten about his planned investigation of its biological and genetic mysteries.

At least until he started developing his own.

* * *

It started slowly. So slowly, he hardly noticed it. A few more grey hairs here and there, a slightly loose tooth in the back of his mouth.

But like all things Night Vale, it quickly spiralled out of control. One night he went to bed with black hair, slightly greying at the temples and one wiggly molar, and woke up with four teeth missing and greyish-white streaks winding their way through the black. If he looked in the mirror long enough, he could actually see their progression, the silver making its leisurely way over his scalp.

So Carlos did what he always did when something particularly strange happened. He called Cecil.

It turned out Cecil was busy. "Cecil," he said into his voicemail, "I have a question for you. Is it normal -- hang on, one of my teeth -- around here for people to start losing their teeth or, uh, stuff like that? Call me back, okay? Let me know if I have to get any supplies for this."

He sat down to wait for Cecil's return call, taking diligent notes about the rate of his hair colour change and what teeth fell out and when. Carlos had just noted _right incisor, 11:39 AM_ down when his phone rang.

He jumped for it immediately. "Cecil?" he said, sounding a little garbled from the unexpected loss of tooth.

"Carlos? Oh my, this must be progressing faster than I thought if you already sound like that!"

"What's progressing?"

"Your metamorphosis, of course!" Carlos can practically hear him beaming through the phone. "It usually happens to children, but since you're from Out Of Town, it would have to happen later. Wow, only two years. Last time we got an outsider it took them twelve!"

"Wait, what?"

"Now you need to place the narwhal meat on your obsidian altar --"

"Narwhal meat?! And you know I still don't have an obsidian altar."

"That's all right, I'll bring mine over. I'll swing by the Ralph's and get you some narwhal chunks, too, since it sounds like you're out."

"Thanks, Cecil. But if you're going to come over, I need to warn you."

"Warn me? Dearest Carlos, there is nothing that could make me not want to see you."

Carlos chuckled a bit at that. "I don't know. It's not just my teeth. Something's going on with my hair, too."

There's a sharp intake of breath on Cecil's end of the phone. "It's not falling out, too, is it?"

"No, it's just the colour."

"Oh, thank god," he breathed. "It would be an absolute _tragedy_ to lose such glorious hair, and on such a happy occasion, too..."

Carlos grinned toothlessly as he listened to Cecil prattle on about his hair.

* * *

By the time Cecil arrived, obsidian altar in one hand, bag of narwhal meat in the other, Carlos had lost all of his teeth, and his hair was quite solidly white.

"Oh," he said, staring down at it with his equally-white eyes. "Can I touch it?"

"Put down the other stuff first," Carlos answered, attempting to hide his rather gummy mouth from view.

"Right, right," Cecil said, quickly setting up the altar under an east-facing window and placing the narwhal meat onto it, packaging and all. "You picked the right time to metamorphose. Narwhal was on sale this week!"

Carlos raises an eyebrow. Cecil stands up and comes to stand in front of him, a fond smile on his face. Carlos grabs his hand and raises it up to his hair.

"Well, it still feels absolutely marvellous," he said, carding his hands through Carlos' hair, a faint fuchsia blush rising to his face. "And the white actually makes a wonderful contrast with your skin. I think it may be even _more_ perfect than before! Who knew, right?" At this point, he trailed off, but continued to run his hands through Carlos' hair, occasionally murmuring a "wow!" or similar exclamation.

"Uh, Cecil?"

"Uh-huh?"

"I hate to interrupt, but what about my teeth?"

"Should be fine. The meat is in place, and the tomes didn't say anything about not using discount chunks."

"So I just ...wait?"

"Essentially, yes. It took my own metamorphosis a week and a half, you know!"

The realization that Cecil at one point wasn't _Cecil_ hit Carlos like a bolt of lightning. It was actually very unsettling to think about him with pupils and irises and blood on the normal human spectrum of colour.

"It's not going to take my teeth a week to grow back, is it? I haven't eaten anything in two days and I don't think I can last another week."

"Hmm, probably not. Old Woman Josie told me it only took a few hours after she put out the narwhal to get hers back. But that was quite a while ago, and Josie killed that narwhal herself..."

"Where'd she get a live narwhal in Night Vale?" Carlos asked, incredulously.

"It wasn't live for long, and there's a reason she's not allowed back at Sea World."

Carlos immediately has a mental image of a small toothless girl wrestling a narwhal while the Sea World staff look on angrily. Sounds like Old Woman Josie to him.

The waiting continued to stretch on, and the two of them wound up falling asleep on Carlos' couch, Cecil's hand still tangled in his hair. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Carlos was awoken by a stabbing pain in his gums, shaking him instantly from his very comfortable slumber.

"Is it starting?" asked Cecil's voice from somewhere to his left, apparently already wide awake.

"I think so."

"Oh, this is exciting. I haven't been to a metamorphosis in _ages_ and I missed your beautiful hair changing..." He looked wistfully into the middle distance for a moment. "I wonder what's going to grow back!"

"Teeth, hopefully," Carlos put in, his hand on his jaw.

"But there are so many options!"

"There are?"

"Oh, Carlos. Sweet, beautiful Carlos. Of course there are! Haven't you been to the dentist?"

"Well..."

This promising thread of conversation was swiftly cut off by a bout of tooth growth. Carlos clapped both his hands over his mouth, Cecil watching with concern but remarkably no fear as blood started to drip down Carlos' chin and between his fingers. Cecil handed him his hankerchief to clean himself up as it subsided, waiting patiently to see the end result.

Carlos, for his part, went to go rinse the blood out of his mouth and from his hands and face, trying not to use his tongue to reveal what he had grown in place of his old teeth. At the very least, it seemed like the final result was something akin to teeth, hard and smooth, and not a set of mouth tentacles or something. Not that there was anything wrong with mouth tentacles, of course; it had always just seemed like it would be difficult to eat with those.

He stood in front of his bathroom mirror for several minutes, trying to will himself to look and see what he had gotten in this surreal physical lottery. "Carlos?" came a soothing voice from the other side of the door. "Are you all right?"

"Um."

"Are you struggling to come to terms with your new appearance?"

"Um."

"Do you want me to look first?"

Carlos considered it. He opened the door.

Cecil was on the other side, waiting quietly with his hands folded behind his back; when he saw Carlos, his face split into an enormous grin, something Carlos felt himself mirror automatically.

"Oh, wow. Wow," he said quietly, his hands rising to the sides of Carlos' face to tilt it back and forth and side to side, allowing him to look from all angles.

"What is it?" Carlos said, still keeping his teeth firmly together.

"Absolutely perfect. So sharp! You should look at these!" he repeated.

"Really?"

"Yes, of course! I wouldn't lie about something like this, you know."

Cecil took his hands off Carlos' face and let him walk back into the brightly-lit bathroom, where he took a deep breath and bared his teeth to his reflection.

They're teeth, all right, but not as he remembers them. Instead of the familiar blunt rectangles, he's got shiny, even rows of triangular fangs, like sharks' teeth. It doesn't seem like the structure of shark teeth should work with his otherwise human physiology, but he just files that tidbit away for future study with the rest of the things he's learned over the last few days. Once he's gotten the measure of his new mouth set-up, he looked over his reflection as a whole.

He looked ...deranged. His hair was messed up from Cecil's earlier attentions and was now a shockingly bright white, despite his relative youth; there were deep circles under his eyes despite having been asleep less than an hour before; his "casual wear" labcoat was horrifically rumpled; and to finish it off, he had grown a gleaming new set of shark fangs. 

He burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" Cecil asked, puzzlement written all over his face.

"I-I-I- I'm, I'm," Carlos wheezed, trying to gather himself enough to form words. "I'm a _mad scientist!_ "

Cecil continued to look completely nonplussed.

"Don't tell me you've never seen an old horror movie or anything! _Frankenstein_ , maybe?" Carlos wasn't certain if Doctor Frankenstein actually looked like this in any of his cinematic incarnations, but it was how he looked in Carlos' imagination, so close enough.

"'Mad' scientist?" Cecil finally said. "Well, now that I think about it, that is more or less what Doctor Taylor looked like, and she did eventually go mad from translating the runes on that obelisk. She was an anthropologist, though, not a scientist _per se_."

"A mad social scientist, then?"

"Yes? I have to say, my dear, I have no idea what's happening in this conversation."

"That's fine."

"You look very handsome and not at all near or off the edge of sanity."

"Thank you, Cecil."

"You're welcome. How do they feel?"

Carlos shifted his jaw around a bit, poked at his teeth with his tongue and then with a fingertip, and clacked them together a few times. 

"Weird," he admitted. "But I think I like it."


End file.
